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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

Lesson #1 seems deliberate to me.

Post war, many urban centers in the US experienced white flight, it seems rational to assume that since these folks moved away from the cities to get away from minorities they would be against infrastructure that would allow minorities to "follow them" to the burbs. But these workers needed a way to get to the city for work, leisure, etc.

What better way to circle that square by building massive infrastructure which requires a middle class income (which allows you to buy a car) to use?

Even now we see lots of resistance by suburban communities to public transportation. In the Portland, OR metro area there is a upper middle class community called Lake Oswego, the residents have continuously lobbied against any form of public transportation in the town, lots of folks complaining about the "crime train".

The metro transit authority which designs new lines has succumbed to the pressure and the newly proposed line while in the vicinity of Lake Oswego avoids the town completely.

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It's a shame to see people campaigning against new regional transit lines, but I have to be at least a little sympathetic. BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime. No matter how you feel about train hoppers, that is a matter of fact in our town.

To the downvotes I face, I'd be curious what you feel is incorrect in what I've said.

This is exactly the mentality that makes getting public transit built a problem.

Trains don't cause crime. The crime was already there because of a whole heap of deeply embedded issues in America that, for various reasons, Americans on the whole prefer to completely ignore.

The problem is that trains make these problems visible. If you rip out the trains you're just sweeping it back under the carpet which is how America tends to deal with these things.

If the best economic opportunity afforded by the trains for someone is crime that's saying something about your society, not the trains.

Bingo.

To add more information to my previous point, a lot of the Lake Oswego residents lobbied against the train because they were afraid of homeless folks being in their neighborhood. The light rail in the Portland, OR area does not have turnstiles and fare enforcement is pretty lax, so its not uncommon to see a homeless person on the train.

The train however hasn't caused the homeless issue, that's a completely different story. The train just allows this issue to become more of a metropolitan area issue instead of a city center issue.

To be more accurate, in this case the crime was somewhere else, and it rode in on the freight rail.

At a muni level, which is where a lot of public transit is done, you are hardly empowered to fix social problems a thousand miles away, so your options are limited. You try to turn away transients, or you don't. SF is in the latter camp, of course.

You describe me as espousing the mentality that blocks public transit. But really, I'm just observing, it is a matter of fact that interstate rail is a source of crime in our town. You can show a crime map of our town, and there is literally a hotspot around the rail line. But I'm still pro-transit, pro-rail, the whole shebang.

If anything, I feel like trying to wave arms, point fingers, & distract from this indisputable fact is sweeping things under the rug. Better we acknowledge it, and include what we're going to do about it in our pitch & plan.

It shouldn't be in the transit planning - it should be addressed at its root cause, instead of trying to paper over the issue by focusing so much on the incidental nature of public transit bringing a shift in location.

Unfortunately, oftentimes people have a very NIMBY attitude about these sort of issues in the US in general, and end up perpetuating the problem through intentional ignorance.

Ok, so station a police officer or two in the vicinity of the stations. No need to block transportation for everyone for a few bad apples.

Your point illustrates the problem very clearly. Both sides have some basis in reality and have valid points about the pros/cons of public transportation. Public transit is a huge benefit to the community but also comes with a set of drawbacks.

Like most things in the US, we are arguing past each other instead of working together to find a solution.

"Let's just agree to disagree" and then nothing ever gets done. It's practically the national motto.

> The crime was already there ...

Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows. People are solving a problem that no longer exists.

An American friend of mine is terrified of going into cities; it's bizarre. I've spent a lot of time in American cities, in all sorts of neighborhoods; I've never had a problem. (Like other American conservatives I've talked to, he also seems to define himself as being in opposition to liberals, in this case by putting down cities and their residents; so perhaps it's partly a political thing. However, it's a bit bizarre that political rhetoric would be confused with reality.)

I don't think it's a political thing, people in cities just seem to have different expectations than people that don't. I live in the suburbs and there isn't anywhere nearby that I would worry about going. My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. My wife has a co-worker who's had someone repeatedly try and break into her house, but she doesn't call the cops because she just considers it part of city life. There are some things that people in cities put up with that I think they only accept because it's been part of their entire life.

> My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. My wife has a co-worker who's had someone repeatedly try and break into her house, but she doesn't call the cops because she just considers it part of city life.

I know many, many people who live in American cities, and I don't know even one person with those experiences or attitudes (unless you mean, there is a specific spot within 2 blocks that feels potentially dangerous in the middle of the night - a 4 square block area in a dense city is a large area with potentially tens of thousands of people).

However, I do know people in suburbs or rural areas with those attitudes and stories. In my experience, almost all the scary stories about cities come from people who don't actually live there - and the less experience they have, the more scary stories they seem to tell, similar to other bogeymen like racial stereotypes. Some people in rural areas seem to love to tell these stories these days.

People I know in cities usually talk about how great it is - or at least how they could never live in the suburbs.

I guess we can argue about anecdata, but the actual data shows that crime is very low.

EDIT: Many edits, mostly reorganization

I wouldn't go that far. When we lived in downtown Baltimore, we definitely told our nanny that there were neighborhoods where the crime was high enough she probably didn't want to go there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandtown-Winchester,_Baltimore. And when we lived in Wilmington, DE, if you went a few blocks south from our apartment (across an underpass beneath the highway), you got to a neighborhood where the crime rate was so high that the EMTs once refused to pick up a dead body after a shooting. Also in Wilmington, someone was shot at the Nike on Market street waiting for a new shoe to be released at like 6 am. Someone was mugged outside my wife's office (in the nice part of the central business district) at 5 pm.

In the city, crime is low enough where you will probably not be a victim of crime (especially if you're wealthy). But it's happening around you, you're aware of it, and property crimes are a real risk if you're not careful.

Meanwhile, now we live in the Annapolis suburbs, and I don't even lock my car when I park it.

> My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal.

It’s probably completely safe. These kinds of stories are normal for people. If you ask indigenous people, the dangerous cannibals are always the tribe living two valleys over from this one, but never themselves or their immediate neighbors.

> Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows. People are solving a problem that no longer exists.

Crime rates are decreasing, but they're still very high.

Glasgow at its worst had a homicide rate of 63 per million.[1] In America, homicide rates are generally reported per 100k - so that's 6.3 per 100k.

In 2015, San Francisco had a homicide rate of 6.1 per 100k. Pittsburgh, which I hear is trying to become a tech hub, was at 18.6 per 100k. Pittsburgh! We don't think of Pittsburgh as a hotbed of crime. But Glasgow was notorious - with a third the homicide rate!

[1] https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12447424.Murder_rates_at...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

American cities are astonishingly dangerous compared to their European and even Canadian counterparts.

This isn't just a big city problem. Many small towns are absolutely rife with violent crime. Suburban areas are, per-capita, not exactly safe either. It's vastly more dangerous to be in suburban Alabama than in pretty much any European city.

It's like Americans prefer to solve their problems with guns and guns alone.

You can get shot at for simply passing someone in some states, road rage all too often ends with shots fired.

Wait a minute, 18.6 per 100k is a per-year statement. So if you lived in Pittsburgh all your life, you have something like a 1.5% lifetime chance of being murdered? Is that right? One in sixty-ish?

Usually people kill people that they already know. So you would have to condition the probability on people you know and where you usually are.

That is correct, though it would be more correct to observe that this rate is only about 0.3% for white Pittsburgers but nearly 10% for black men. (Black males make up 12% of the population but about 80% of murder victims.)

> An American friend of mine is terrified of going into cities; it's bizarre. I've spent a lot of time in American cities, in all sorts of neighborhoods; I've never had a problem.

Speak for yourself. I lived in downtown Atlanta from 2008-2012. In that time, someone broke into the building I lived in and robbed the person in the room below me at gunpoint. I also saw someone get bashed in the head with a rock. And my sister in law’s neighbors were robbed at gunpoint while trick-or-treating. There were two children in that group. She also had a lawyer acquaintance who was taken out by someone for hire on the sidewalk in the middle of the day. Oh, and my friend’s boyfriend was robbed on the sidewalk at gunpoint at 5:00 PM right next to rush hour traffic.

I’ve been in San Francisco for a little while now and don’t feel significantly safer. It’s easy to say there are no problems when nothing has happened to you personally.

> It’s easy to say there are no problems when nothing has happened to you personally.

That's why anecdotes are not very helpful.

>Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows

Crime rates were much lower before about 1960, and are often argued to have been similarly low in the early 20th century and late 19th century.

There are a variety of suggested causes, but the most obvious one is heroin, which became a drug of abuse in the '10s, disappeared during WWII, and then came roaring back. It's difficult for modern Westerners to imagine a time before heroin, but it makes sense to me that crime rates would have been lower. The feelings associated with being a good person are usually enough to motivate people to be good, but they don't hold a candle to heroin's flamethrower. This hypothesis also explains Japan and Australia's relative safety, since geography is on their side.

These sorts of folks are often afraid of travel of any sort and are hooked on fear-based television.

When I was younger I traveled a lot and found that the things people think about other countries (or nearby cities) are mostly false.

I think we ought to build transit despite the objections, but I disagree with this (frustratingly common) line of reasoning:

Locking doors is just papering over the societal dysfunction that leads people to become burglars. If no one had a door lock, maybe they would be more motivated to fix the underlying social issue instead of just pushing crime elsewhere.

Would you actually support the elimination of locks?

Commuter rail doesn't bring a crime wave. It brings lots of eyeballs and foot traffic that unsavory types would rather avoid.

Yes, it is definitely true, commuter rail is a different story from interstate freight.

^^ key point, I'm glad to see it came from you actually! I'd add that it's rare to see well-used transit systems where stations end up being hotbeds of crime; it's mostly the poorly designed and barely utilized ones where that becomes the case.

For example, where I grew up, Cleveland, the stations definitely have a pretty grungy vibe, but I'd attribute that largely to the fact that RTA is super slow and infrequent, there are so few lines for such a large geographical mass that you can't do most trips with RTA, and many of the stations dump you in pretty unwalkable, economically dead neighborhoods. Even if you rode it somewhere, there's a very high probability you'd continue a journey on a bus for a crazy long amount of time or need a car to get you to your destination somehow. Even in the well-positioned spots like Ohio City, the station design dumps you next to a bridge on the opposite side of a crazy intersection with no crosswalk that takes like 5 minutes of walking through parking lots and past the garbage-smelling loading dock of the West Side Market to get to any of the businesses there. What a joke lol.

The general assertion that mass transit brings crime is very common but isn't supported by evidence [0].

Not to mention the prejudicial undertones it carries...

[0] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/the-myth-that-mass-tr...

Thanks for the link. Perhaps my core mistake here is speaking from a context of rail freight, when this is really about mass transit.

I live in Boston. The Orange Line mostly runs through neighborhoods you wouldn't want to go to at night (or even in broad daylight), but recently they put in a new stop with a lot of development aimed at the upper middle class. Assembly is within walking distance from Sullivan, but somehow the crime doesn't bleed over.

I did live for a few years in an... exurban, if not quite rural, Southern county that had been successfully resisting commuter rail for a long time, but I think that was about keeping the yuppies out as much as anything else. And it's hard to object to that. I was there for college, and a lot of both the professors and the students came in from the Northeast and hated the townies.

(I went the opposite direction - grew up around there and then figured I'm in the same country as the Yanks and may as well go see what they're about.)

Hi, NJ native chiming in here. We have a vast majority of our state served by regional and light rail services, as well as a bus system that supplements it to areas where it would be difficult to get added rail lines.

Anecdotally, you can find drugs, needles or crime just about anywhere if you want. There are amazingly safe suburbs with train stations as well as less safe suburbs with train stations and city stops on both side of the spectrum. These people aren't riding the rails to get to some juicy soft targets out in the wealthy burbs.

Crime is a law enforcement problem, not a transportation problem. Your whole post is NIMBY nonsense. I promise you, there's plenty of poor drug addicts and criminals in areas that aren't served by any sort of mass transit. Your thesis that they'll come ruin a perfectly good thing is just as flawed as my thesis that they'll magically all stop behaving that way if we gave them mass transit which allowed them greater access to different job opportunities (there's elements of truth in both, but they're both more complex then just a quick summary)

TL;dr- What's incorrect about your statement is basically everything in your statement, or at least your perception of cause and effect.

An addendum: crime isn't just a law enforcement problem, it's reflective of broader societal ills like wealth inequality, poor education, and lack of access to opportunity. In my opinion, law enforcement is a bandaid for those symptoms, but does not strike at the underlying issues, and defining crime and poverty as that domain is also probably counterproductive to reducing them long term.

My experience in most of East Asia is that the police are extremely unintimidating [1] when you see them but generally invisible otherwise, perhaps indicating that strong law enforcement is not a requirement for managing crime rates.

[1] Tokyo: https://imgur.com/a/FGstZJ3

I'll concede that describing it as a "law enforcement" problem is a bit of a broad stroke (what is the purpose of these laws? who made them? are they just and fair? etc.)

My point was that trying to blame trains for importing criminals is a weak, unsubstantiated argument lacking true causation. OP later posted that "if you look at a crime map, you'll see a hot spot around the train stations". This is an objective fact, but the conclusion is only one of many possibilities (criminals are more likely to attack people in transit because they carry more valuables, people are more irritable after travel and likely to engage in crime, train stations have higher concentrations of people than other sectors and therefor see a higher number of criminals, there's more enforcement, etc). I was mostly attempting to address that point.

Crime is, ultimately and simplistically, a law enforcement problem. Preventing criminals from turning to crime is a social services/educational problem. What things constitute crimes is a societal/cultural issue. Poverty is a whole OTHER ball of wax, although many behaviors of the most impoverished are criminalized.

FWIW, Japan has plenty of problems when it comes to policing and crime due to their culture of expected police success rates.

> strong law enforcement is not a requirement for managing crime rates.

There are strains of American culture that have long been violent and confrontational. These strains are perpetuated by "polite" society that has used violence and segregation to keep them at bay. IOW, we're an altogether violent society.

Addressing these dynamics is difficult to say the least, but it's why we can't simply import strategies from abroad. So, for example, we can't simply take guns away from the cops without also refactoring our criminal and mental health systems to comprehensively deescalate things. Our inability to holistically change (independent from ideology) is why drug decriminalization and lessened property crime punishment have created such spectacular social failures.

That said, to be fair East and Southeast Asian countries tend to have very strict and swift criminal punishments, particularly for drugs and violence. Even in Japan--https://www.tofugu.com/japan/drug-laws-in-japan/ In some key ways Asia practices more violence and segregation than the U.S.

I think it's mostly Western Europeans and South Americans that are all-around softies.

How many stowaways still travel via freight trains in the US?

I also don't see any real comparison of freight and public transit via rail other than they are both trains...

We've had similar problems in the areas around Baltimore. A nearby mall used to be a nice place to go until they added bus stops that go back and forth between the mall and the city. Afterwards, they're starting being a problem with drugs, assaults, and 1-2 murders in the parking lot before they had to put up guard towers throughout the parking lot. There's also a nearby train stop that the county is trying to get closed because people ride the train in, steal stuff from the houses and stores in the surrounding area, then hop back on the train to get away.

The Anne Arundel county stuff is BS, same old fear and segregation, crime remains low, and there's basically no evidence the rail is bringing people in to do more crime[1]. This isn't even the first time this has come up over the years. Similar things happened in the ATL 'burbs back in the day, before MARTA was built out, and they successfully stymied its expansion.

[1] https://ggwash.org/view/68549/some-anne-arundel-county-wants...

> BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime.

That's the equivalent of asking the cops to kick all the homeless people out of your neighborhood, into the one next door.

You haven't fixed the problem, you just used your political power to make it someone else's problem.

People who downvote have never had this sort of behavior anywhere near where they live. It's easy to complain about NIMBY's hating public transit when you have no idea what it's like. Tell me their public transit and food kitchen access is more important than my wife being able to walk to the supermarket without getting hollered at by some bum.

Give me a break, people who oppose these aren't heartless, they're facing a reality the keyboard warriors here don't have to face, and a reality that would flip any of these downvoters to the other side in a heartbeat.

The wife being hollered at isn't a problem with homelessness; I would consider it a problem with the way women are viewed in society. I don't see the correlation between homelessness and the harassment of women in public spaces. I also have lived by public transport and far from public transport and haven't really noticed a difference in terms of the population of crime or homelessness. The vast majority of the homeless people I met were polite, sitting away from pedestrian traffic with a cup or a cardboard sign, or just verbally begging for money going from train to train. The harassment of women can and does occur anywhere and from any class of people.

That is to say, I don't actually understand what is trying to be correlated here, and I feel the dismissive attitudes of people who are pro-transport as to simply not have experienced transport, as if transport itself is so terrible that the only people who would support it are the people who never lived with it, to be disingenuous and not conducive to a productive conversation on the subject. Is it really so unbelievable that I can live in a place with mass transit and actually enjoy the experience?

Their public transit and food kitchen access is more important than your wife being able to walk to the supermarket without getting hollered at.

I'm happy you feel that way, let them pollute the sidewalk of your neighborhood instead.

We're talking about human beings who are neglected by civic institutions and are often mentally ill, using affordable transportation to access food they need to survive. Yeah, great way to show that people who oppose these aren't heartless.

There has to be a better way to help the mentally ill, than simply giving them cheaper transportation.

I feel that is just a bandaid to the gaping wound of a problem.

There seems a like a simple fix to that.

Charge more money for people to get off at certain places.

Make it 10 dollars to stop off at a high income area to avoid undesirables from taking transit there.

Use that extra money to subsidize even further for where you want the undesirables to transit to.

So, if all the grocery stores are in "high income" or even "mid-income" areas... folks are taxed a bit extra to do their shopping?

It also seems a bit counter-intuitive. The point of public transit - a good system, anyway - is to encourage folks to ride it. Having a high fee for certain areas would actively discourage folks from using such a system and might actually reinforce a stereotype that mass transit is for poor folks.

The problem with your viewpoint is that its only looking at transit in isolation. Transit is just one piece of creating a safe, livable cities. The city/state/province/country needs to and should invest in crime prevention, poverty alleviation, job creation etc at the same time to create great cities.

You can't equivocate transients with working class people or even the anti-social people that hide in working class neighborhoods. And in any event there are ways to keep undesirables at bay that focus on anti-social behaviors and conditions, not income status.

Transit also cuts both ways in that it allows low-wage workers to commute into an area without necessarily having to live there.

For both these reasons you won't find many homeless in the Pacific Heights or Marina neighborhoods of San Francisco, despite their proximity to the Tenderloin and Western Addition.

> BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime.

Why does this not happen in the EU? Almost all the pictures of the US public transport I've seen show dirty interiors filled with people looking poor and/or dangerous while in the EU (not in every EU country or city perhaps but what I've seen so far) trains and stations look and feel almost like planes and airports, cost very cheap (about a dollar to travel within a city), all the normal people use trains, trams and buses actively and people you'd prefer to avoid are rare.

I live near a DC Metro station that opened just a few years ago. Any time some minor crime is reported on Nextdoor (and it’s usually a minor theft of items from an unlocked car, the blockheads), people come out of the woodwork to say how everything has been awful since Metro came and it brought all this crime.

It’s especially funny since I’ve never seen anyone who remotely looks like an unsavory character at that station (whether by bigot standards or otherwise) and it’s a typical suburban station with not a whole lot around it, so it would be a dumb destination for criminals looking for new territory to exploit.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-h...

"This summer, as New Yorkers head out to Long Island’s beach towns and parks on the Southern State Parkway, they’ll pass beneath a series of overpass bridges made infamous in Robert A. Caro’s monumental 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

In one of the book's most memorable passages, Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised. The story was told to Caro by Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission."

This article says that the story is not necessarily that straightforward, but this does speak directly to your comment.

Marin County is the same way. Main reason BART doesn’t go there is because they don’t want “those people” to be able to get there.

This seemed like the #1 obvious reason to me. Race should've played a much larger part of that explanation. It has dictated so much of American civil life, especially the organization of neighborhoods, that it seems like the most obvious reason we have different transportation options than European cities.

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